6,883 research outputs found
Compost and digestate: sustainability, benefits, impacts for the environment and for plant production
This proceedings volume contains the papers presented at the CODIS 2008 congress held on 27 - 29 February 2008 in Solothurn (Switzerland).The composting and digestion of biogenic waste materials and the subsequent application of compost and digestate to soil contributes to nutrient recycling and renewable energy production. Moreover, compost and digestate can improve soil fertility and suppress plant diseases. On the other hand, compost and digestate may also contain a variety of pollutants hazardous to soil, such as heavy metals and organic contaminants.Compost and digestate have been thoroughly investigated in the framework of two associated projects entitled Organic Pollutants in Compost and Digestate in Switzerland and Effects of Composts and Digestate on the Environment, Soil Fertility and Plant Health. These projects yielded new insights into the properties of compost and digestate, mainly with regard to biological parameters and the occurrence of both classic and emerging organic pollutants.The CODIS 2008 congress was the final event of these two projects
Thermal Pions
I discuss the absorption and dispersion of pions in hot matter. A two-loop
calculation in the framework of chiral perturbation theory is presented and its
result is compactly written in terms of the two- and three-particle forward
scattering amplitudes. At modest temperatures, MeV, the
change in the pion mass is small and its dispersion law closely resembles the
free space one. At these temperatures, all quantities of interest are given to
a good degree of accuracy by the first term in the virial expansion which is
linear in the density. (BUTP-93/16, uses espcrc1.sty from North-Holland
Publishing)Comment: 7 pp, LaTeX, uses espcrc1.sty from North-Holland Publishing,
BUTP-93/1
Quantitative analyses of empirical fitness landscapes
The concept of a fitness landscape is a powerful metaphor that offers insight
into various aspects of evolutionary processes and guidance for the study of
evolution. Until recently, empirical evidence on the ruggedness of these
landscapes was lacking, but since it became feasible to construct all possible
genotypes containing combinations of a limited set of mutations, the number of
studies has grown to a point where a classification of landscapes becomes
possible. The aim of this review is to identify measures of epistasis that
allow a meaningful comparison of fitness landscapes and then apply them to the
empirical landscapes to discern factors that affect ruggedness. The various
measures of epistasis that have been proposed in the literature appear to be
equivalent. Our comparison shows that the ruggedness of the empirical landscape
is affected by whether the included mutations are beneficial or deleterious and
by whether intra- or intergenic epistasis is involved. Finally, the empirical
landscapes are compared to landscapes generated with the Rough Mt.\ Fuji model.
Despite the simplicity of this model, it captures the features of the
experimental landscapes remarkably well.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures; to appear in Journal of Statistical Mechanics:
Theory and Experimen
Sporopollenin, a natural copolymer, is robust under high hydrostatic pressure
Lycopodium sporopollenin, a natural copolymer, shows exceptional stability under high hydrostatic pressures (10 GPa) as determined by in situ high pressure synchrotron source FTIR spectroscopy. This stability is evaluated in terms of the component compounds of the sporopollenin: p-coumaric acid, phloretic acid, ferulic acid, and palmitic and sebacic acids, which represent the additional n-acid and ndiacid components. This high stability is attributed to interactions between these components, rather than the exceptional stability of any one molecular component. We propose a biomimetic solution for the creation of polymer materials that can withstand high pressures for a multitude of uses in aeronautics, vascular autografts, ballistics and light-weight protective materials
Internal-state thermometry by depletion spectroscopy in a cold guided beam of formaldehyde
We present measurements of the internal state distribution of
electrostatically guided formaldehyde. Upon excitation with continuous tunable
ultraviolet laser light the molecules dissociate, leading to a decrease in the
molecular flux. The population of individual guided states is measured by
addressing transitions originating from them. The measured populations of
selected states show good agreement with theoretical calculations for different
temperatures of the molecule source. The purity of the guided beam as deduced
from the entropy of the guided sample using a source temperature of 150K
corresponds to that of a thermal ensemble with a temperature of about 30 K
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